Dreaming in Cuban (19 page)
Authors: Cristina Garcia
In the following weeks, Celia boils mild chicken broths for her son, feeding him one spoonful at a time. He eats instinctively, without comprehension, and she reads him poetry from the clutter of books on her dresser, hoping to console him.
Me he perdido muchas veces por el mar
con el oído lleno de flores recién cortadas,
con la lengua llena de amor y de agonía.
Muchas veces me he perdido por el mar,
como me pierdo en el corazón de algunos niños
.
Could her son, Celia wonders, have inherited her habit of ruinous passion? Or is passion indiscriminate, incubating haphazardly like a cancer?
Celia hopes that the sea, with its sustaining rhythms and breezes from distant lands, will ease her son’s heart as it once did hers. Late at night, she rocks on her wicker swing as Javier sleeps, and wonders why it is so difficult to be happy.
Of her three children, Celia sympathizes most with her son. Javier’s affliction, at least, has a name, even if it has no certain cure. Celia understands his suffering all too well. Perhaps that is why she is restless in its presence.
She understands, too, how Javier’s anguish attracts the eligible women of Santa Teresa del Mar, who bring him casseroles covered with starched cloths and look into his night-sky eyes, imagining themselves as his bright constellations. Even the married women drop by to inquire about Javier’s health, to hold his hands, warm as blood, and comfort him, when all the time they pray, “Oh to be loved by this beautiful, sad boy!”
Celia remembers how her own eyes were once like her son’s—hollow sockets that attracted despair like a magnet. But in her case, neighbors had kept their distance, believing she was destined for an early death and anyone she touched would be forced to accompany her. They were afraid of her disease as if it were fatal, like tuberculosis, but worse, much worse.
What they feared even more, Celia realized later, was that passion might spare them entirely, that they’d die conventionally, smug and purposeless, having never savored its blackness.
After two months in his mother’s bed, Javier emerges from Celia’s room. He dusts off the bottle of rum in the dining-room
cabinet, rinses a glass, chips ice from the freezer, and pours himself a long drink. Then he leans forward in the dining-room chair as if expecting electricity to shoot through it, and finishes the bottle in one sitting.
The next day he dresses in his mended tweed suit, takes a bill from his stash of American money, and buys a bottle of rum from a black-market dealer on the outskirts of town. He visits the dealer frequently, despite the rising prices, and buys one bottle after another after another. Javier can afford to be a drunk, Celia overhears her neighbors gossiping. The price of a liter of rum keeps most of them, with their monthly coupons and meager earnings, stone-cold sober.
As her son’s condition deteriorates, Celia reluctantly cuts back on her revolutionary activities. She decides one last case before she resigns as a judge for the People’s Court. Simón Córdoba, a boy of fifteen, has written a number of short stories considered to be antirevolutionary. His characters escape from Cuba on rafts of sticks and tires, refuse to harvest grapefruit, dream of singing in a rock and roll band in California. One of Simon’s aunts found the stories stuffed under a sofa cushion and informed the neighborhood committee.
Celia suggests to the boy that he put down his pen for six months and work as an apprentice with the Escambray Theater, which educates peasants in the countryside. “I don’t want to discourage your creativity, Simón,” Celia tells the boy gently. “I just want to reorient it toward the revolution.” After all, she thinks, artists have a vital role to play, no? Perhaps later, when the system has matured, more liberal policies may be permitted.
Celia’s life resumes a stale, familiar air. She no longer volunteers for the microbrigades, and only guards her stretch of shore one night per month. The rest of the time, she tends to Javier’s needs. She hadn’t expected her son’s illness to take this turn, and she feels helpless and angry, like the times Jorge had bullied Javier as a child. In fact, Javier is a small boy again. Celia
helps dress him and combs his hair, reminds him to brush his teeth, and ties his shoelaces. She tucks him into her bed at night, absently stroking his brow. But when she holds her son’s face in her hands, Celia sees only an opaque resentment. Is it his, she wonders, or her own?
Despite her care, Javier’s skin turns sallow and thins until it looks as if she could strip it away in papery sheets. His knuckles heal poorly and he is clumsy with everything but his tumbler of rum. Since Javier returned home, Celia has hardly thought of Felicia, who has been missing since winter, or of the twins or of Ivanito, away at boarding school, or of the faraway Pilar. Something tells Celia that if she can’t save her son she won’t be able to save herself, or Felicia, or anyone she loves.
With the help of some microbrigade friends in the capital, Celia tracks down the
santera
from east Havana who had diagnosed her in 1934, when she was dying of love for the Spaniard.
“I knew it was you,” the
santera
says, clapping her hands with brittle twig fingers when she finds Celia on her doorstep. Her face is black and puckered and oily now and seems to breathe all at once like an undersea creature. But when she smiles, her skin pulls back like a curtain, stretching her features until they are as lineless as a young woman’s.
She places her speckled hands over Celia’s heart, and nods solemnly as if to say, “I am here,
hija
. Speak to me.” She listens closely to Celia, and they decide to travel together to Santa Teresa del Mar.
The
santera
looks up at the brick-and-cement house, bleached by the sun and the ocean air, and positions herself under the pawpaw tree in the front yard. She prays every Catholic prayer she knows in quick, calm succession. Hail Marys, Our Fathers, the Apostles’ Creed. Her body starts to sway, and her clasped hands rock beneath her chin until it seems she is all loose, swinging angles. And then, as Celia watches, the little
santera
’s moist
eyes roll back in her dwarfish head until the whites gleam from two pinpricks, and she trembles once, twice, and slides against Celia in a heap on the sidewalk, smoking like a wet fire, sweet and musky, until nothing is left of her but her fringed cotton shawl.
Celia, not knowing what else to do, folds the
santera’s
shawl into her handbag, and enters her home.
She knows by the stillness of the house that Javier is already gone. He’d talked of going to the mountains, of planting coffee on the forested slopes. He said he’d descend to Santiago for carnival and dance to the fifes and the
melé
, to the snare and the
batá
drums, that he’d die (in sequins and feathers) at the head of a conga line in Céspedes Park.
Celia reaches up and feels a lump in her chest, compact as a walnut. A week later, the doctors remove her left breast. In its place they leave a pink, pulpy scar like the one she’d discovered on her son’s back.
February 11, 1950
Querido
Gustavo,
Even on her deathbed, Berta Arango del Pino cursed me. Last month she got a chest cold that turned into a pneumonia, and before you know it she was dead. Jorge asked me to go with him to Palmas Street because his mother swore she wanted to make her peace with me. But when I arrived, she threw a decanter that shattered at my feet and stained my hem green with absinthe.
“You stole my husband!” she screamed at me, then she reached for Jorge, stretching her arms pathetically, her fingers moving like worms. “Come here, my lover. Come to my bed.” Ofelia’s mouth dropped wide as a shovel and then her mother turned to her and shrieked, “Whore! What are you looking at?” And with those words Dona Berta fell back on her pillows, her mouth twisted, her eyes bulging like a hanged man’s, and died. Poor Jorge has been terribly shaken by all this.
Celia
April 11, 1951
Querido
Gustavo,
Are you a good father? I ask you this because of Jorge. There is something harsh, something unyielding about him when it comes to our son. Javier never runs to greet his father like his sisters do because he knows the lessons, the admonishments will begin the minute his father sees him. If you can believe this, Jorge has been forcing our son to study accounting. “For the love of God!” I say. “He’s only five years old!”
Even Felicia sticks up for her brother, but Jorge ignores us. He is plagued by dreams of that milk-truck accident years ago and fears we’ll be left destitute unless Javier learns to manage the family’s money. The splinters of glass embedded in Jorge’s spine still cause him great discomfort, but this does not excuse his unreasonableness. I try to make it up to the boy after Jorge leaves, baking
natilla
, his favorite dessert, but Javier senses my weakness and is growing cold toward me, too.
Kiss your sons if you have them, Gustavo. Kiss them goodnight.
Yours,
Celia
March 11, 1952
Mi
Gustavo,
That bastard Batista stole the country from us just when it seemed things could finally change. The U.S. wants him in the palace. How else could he have pulled this off? I fear for my son, learning to be a man from such men. You’d be proud of me,
mi amor
. Last month I campaigned for the Orthodox Party. Felicia helped me paste up fliers in the plaza, but people shouted at us and tore the papers in our faces.
Afterward, Felicia took me to her best friend Herminia’s house. Her father, Salvador, is a
santería
priest, an unassuming, soft-spoken man, black as the blackest Africans. He surprised me by serving us tea and homemade cookies. I’m not sure what I expected, I’d heard so many frightful stories about him. When I spoke about fighting Batista, he said it was useless, that the scoundrel is under the protection of Changó, god of fire and lightning. Batista’s destiny, Salvador told me, is set. He will escape Cuba with a fortune in his suitcase, and die of natural causes.
If what he says is true, there will be no justice for Batista. But for the rest of us, Gustavo, for the rest of us, there may be hope.
Love,
Celia
August 11, 1953
Querido
Gustavo,
Yesterday, I took the bus to Havana to join the protesters in front of the palace. We marched for the release of the rebels who survived the attack on Moneada. Their leader is a young lawyer, like you were once, Gustavo, idealistic and self-assured. Jorge called last night from Baracoa, and when Lourdes told him where I’d gone, he became very upset. That girl is a stranger to me. When I approach her, she turns numb, as if she wanted to be dead in my presence. I see how different Lourdes is with her father, so alive and gay, and it hurts me, but I don’t know what to do. She still punishes me for the early years.
My love,
Celia
May 11, 1954
Gustavo,
I’m very worried about Felicia. She’s left high school and says she wants to work. She takes the bus to Havana every afternoon and doesn’t come back until late at night. She tells me she’s looking for a job. But there’s only one job in the city for fifteen-year-old girls like her.
Felicia is spirited and unpredictable, and this frightens me. I’ve heard too many stories of young girls destroyed by what passes as tourism in this country. Cuba has become the joke of the Caribbean, a place where everything and everyone is for sale. How did we allow this to happen?
Tu
Celia
October 11, 1954
Querido
Gustavo,
Javier won the children’s national science prize for a genetics experiment. His teachers tell me he’s a genius. I’m very proud of him, but I’m not exactly sure for what. Lourdes takes out scientific texts for him from the college library and he locks himself in his room to read for days at a time. Lourdes takes out books for me, too. I’m reading
Madame Bovary
in French now, grievously, very grievously.
Yours always,
Celia
P.S. Felicia got a job selling stationery at El Encanto, where I used to work. All the society girls come and order their wedding invitations there. I don’t know how long she’ll last, though. Felicia has no patience for such frivolous girls.
April 11, 1955
Mi querido
Gustavo,
There was a three-person band in the Parque Central today that played their ballads with such heart that many people lingered to hear them. The singer’s voice sounded just like Beny Moré’s in his finest years. One song made me cry, and I saw others crying, too, as they tossed their coins in the musicians’ hat.
Mírame, miénteme, pégame, mátame si quieres
Pero no me dejes. No, no me dejes, nunca jamás …
And this in the park across from the Hotel Inglaterra! Forgive me, Gustavo. It is April, and I am melancholy, and twenty-one years have passed.
Yours always,
Celia
June 11, 1955
Gustavo,
The rebels have been released! Now the revolution is close enough to smell. We’ll get rid of Batista the way we did that tyrant Machado. But this time,
mi amor
, we’ll make it stick like rice to a pot!
Love,
Celia
(1977)
L
ourdes Puente welcomes the purity, the hollowness of her stomach. It’s been a month since she stopped eating, and already she’s lost thirty-four pounds. She envisions the muscled walls of her stomach shrinking, contracting, slickly clean from the absence of food and the gallons of springwater she drinks. She feels transparent, as if the hard lines of her hulking form were disintegrating.
It is dawn, an autumn dawn, and Lourdes is walking. She is walking mile after mile, pumping her arms furiously, her eyes fixed determinedly before her. She is walking down Fulton Street in her mauve velour jogging suit, past the shabby May’s department store with mannequins from another era, past shuttered shops and bus-stop benches draped with sleeping bums. Lourdes turns and strides past Brooklyn’s sooty town hall, past the state supreme court, where the Son of Sam trial will take place. Lourdes can’t understand what happened with Son of Sam, only that he exists and that he had a dog that commanded
him to kill. His victims were girls with dark flowing hair, young girls like Pilar. But, no matter what Lourdes said, Pilar refused to pin up her hair or hide it under a knitted cap as other girls did. No, Pilar let her hair swing long and loose, courting danger.
